How I Decorated My Bar Cart To Look Expensive (while sticking to a budget)

Do you really have an apartment without a bar cart?! hah! I've been scheming up ways in my head for the last year to add a bar cart into my apartment. I'm nearing the end of places to decorate in my apartment (but don't worry - the flip house is going to be FULL of decor ideas ) and I had one last big wall to do something on.

My kitchen is open to my living room and the wall between it is decently large. It was the perfect place to add a bar cart. Tbh, I'm not the biggest fan of the "bar cart" look. I feel like it's really hard to decorate it in a way that looks cute and not tacky. 

Now that it's done, I'm mad I waited so long. Between the mirror, the actual bar cart, the decor...everything (!!!) I love it. And best part, it was actually really affordable to put together!

THE MIRROR:

I had this vision of having a super large mirror leaning up against the wall. Not only is it cute, but it fully opens the space and makes the apartment look way bigger.

I'm super into arched mirrors right now and quickly realized that they are EXPENSIVE. I searched for hours trying to find one that was wide enough and tall enough. The best deal I could find by far was this from Urban Outfitters. I got it in the XL Large size.

THE BAR CART:

The bar cart saga...I had a WIDE range of prices for bar carts that I liked. I was very specific with the bar cart I wanted. I needed it to be black and don't like things coming off of it (aka wine bottle holder, etc). 

I screenshotted the images above from my Instagram stories but these were the 6 bar carts I was debating between with my thoughts on each one. 

Shockingly, I ended up going with bar cart #5 which was the cheapest. Considering I almost bought bar cart #1 for $600, bar cart #5 being only $97 was a MAJOR win!

Here's the links to all the bar carts I was debating between:

THE BAR CART PRINTABLES:

I knew I wanted to add two frames with some art in it. Sarah designed these and they are SO GOOD!

You can download these bar cart art for free on this post.

THE BAR CART DECOR:

Here's where I found everything on the bar cart. It is all so cute and I am obsessed!

HOW I MADE THE MOCKUPS FOR THE BAR CART...

One of my favorite things to do when starting to decorate a space is put together a moodboard of sorts for it. It just helps you visualize the space a little better and make sure that what you're thinking will look good in real life.

I find it easiest to put these together in Canva. I remove the background of the images from the website remove.bg. Sarah actually discovered this website and it saves me SO much time. I use to do it in Photoshop which was just a process. Remove.bg takes the background away in seconds and it's free.